[nl]

It's like they never actually ran Windows 95 and had the experience of people accepting your operating system crashing daily. It was much more reliable than Windows 3.1 after all (and to be fair to MS, was also more reliable than MacOS System 7 and ran faster than OS2).

There's always been good software and bad software.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Windows particularly made terrible software acceptable. Windows really was an utterly unforgivable PoS compared to DR's Gem + TOS on the Atari and AmigaOS (multitasking!) on the Amiga - both of which were already around in the mid-80s.

It really took incredible hubris to sell Win95 as a huge step forward for the industry when it was so hugely inferior in quality to an OS that had been hacked together by a small team of best-in-world hardware and software designers ten years earlier.

But it did succeed in one area - which was doing a great job of lowering consumer expectations and making the most appalling carelessness and incompetence seem like a boon from the tech gods.